The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy - Tooze, Adam.epub

Adam Tooze has just written the definitive account of the Nazi economy. But he has done much more than that. He has also rewritten the history of the Second World War. By thinking afresh about what Hitler’s war aims really were and how the Nazi leadership attempted first to win and then prolong a war for which they knew they never possessed sufficient resources, Tooze has produced the most striking history of German strategy in the Second World War that we possess. This is an extraordinary achievement, and it places Adam Tooze in a very select company of historians indeed.

The fundamental insight at the heart of this work is that Hitler’s challenge to the United States was made in utter earnest. Whereas others have laid the accent on Hitler’s thwarted love affair with imperial Britain and his visceral hatred of Bolshevik Russia, for Tooze his ultimate antagonist was the United States, with Roosevelt as the ultimate instrument of ‘World Jewry’. Britain and Russia had appeared as the twin poles in Hitler’s first volume of Mein Kampf, but it was how to compete with America which preoccupied him in the lesser-known second volume.